The frequency of psychosis among mass shooters was not clearly stated in an April 17th Style article. Psychosis is common among perpetrators of mass shootings as a whole. It is less common among shooters who are well organized and therefore kill more victims.
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Dark Matter: The Psychology Of Mass Murder
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Mass murder -- like yesterday's -- is starkly different from serial killings, the other type of murder that fascinates and frightens.
Serial killers, forensic psychiatrists say, derive sexual gratification from their killings. The Ted Bundys, the Jeffrey Dahmers, the John Wayne Gacys -- they don't want to be caught. They often enjoy taunting police. The violence is, in its own perverse way, about pleasure.
"Serial killers are more like drug addicts than anything else," Kaye says. "They need to ramp up the excitement each time, they're getting reinforcement from their acts. They're running on the dopamine side of the brain. They're running on highs."
It's not that way for mass killers -- guys who take out a gun and try to kill as many people as possible. They're not looking for highs -- they're depressed, angry and humiliated. They tend to be rejected in some romantic relationship, or are sexually incompetent, are paranoid, and their resentment builds. They develop shooting fantasies for months or years, stockpiling dreams and ammunition. The event that finally sets them off, Welner says, is usually anticlimactic -- an argument, a small personal loss that magnifies a sense of catastrophic failure.
"But they don't 'snap,' as you so often hear people say," Welner says. "It's more like a hinge swings open, and all this anger comes out."
They plan everything about the killings, he says, except how to get away.
"It's about suicide," Welner says. "It's about tying one's masculinity to destruction."
It's also rare for them to be truly psychotic, he says. Psychotics hear voices and people from outer space and talking dogs. These are shooters like Russell Weston Jr., who ran into the Capitol building and killed two police officers. He believed he was being told to do so by alien radio transmissions.
Perhaps these sorts of taxonomies are the building blocks of actual knowledge, and someday they will matter.
For now, there are no real answers, no real solace, no real consolation.
The answers to heartbreak, to unending loss, are only what we make them to be. They are only the best we can do.
